A fleet of coreboot laptops assembles

Following up on our status update where we revealed the imminent shipping date and general availability of our laptops this June, we’re happy to let you know today that we’ve recently had a breakthrough in our work to port the new laptops to coreboot, thanks to the fruitful collaboration between our coreboot developer Youness “KaKaRoTo” Alaoui and Matt “Mr. Chromebox” DeVillier (to whom we sent a prototype unit). Our coreboot port is now working for both the Librem 13 v2 and the Librem 15 v3, with all the test cases passing.

We are now pretty confident that we should be able to have coreboot firmware ready in time for factory preloading of the new inventory we’ll be shipping from in June. As we receive the first “production” units, we will ship some of those across the border, so that Youness can re-test and finalize the port on those machines (the results should be the same, but we want to make sure everything is top-notch). I will also seize the opportunity to take good reference images in our photo studio.

In the meantime, Youness is currently busy preparing his code contributions to be upstreamed officially to the coreboot project, after which he will be attending the 2017 edition of the coreboot conference in Denver. You will also soon be able to read his latest technical findings as part of the current round of coreboot ports.

The only model that will remain to be ported to coreboot afterwards will be the Librem 15 v2 (it turns out that the “v1” was an early demonstration unit that was sent out to some reviewers but never made it into large-scale production, so it does not actually need to be ported), thus reaching a milestone and honouring a promise that many of you have been eagerly looking forward to. That remaining port should be fairly straightforward to do, now that Youness has gained a lot of experience with other models. Then, depending on how the timing plays out this summer, our reverse engineering work is expected to resume from where we left off.